debAPP

High school debate is becoming an increasingly popular, challenging, and rewarding extracurricular activity for students everywhere. Although the debaters are constantly becoming more advanced, the technology is lacking. One of the biggest problems with debates today is the judging process. Every round in the debate, the judge has to write comments, scores, and reasoning behind the winner chosen, all using pen and paper. That paper ballot is sent to a middle man, where it is eventually hand counted and copied over into the ranking system. This judging system leads to inefficiencies with time and scoring.

"Being able to implement the programming skills we learned over the summer into a solution to a problem that was directly affecting us was by far the best part of creating debAPP."— Sabrina

It's 2014 -- we have the technology, why aren't we using it?

Our solution to this problem is a web-based app, called debAPP. debAPP is the first of its kind as a debate centered app. It allows the judges to type and submit all the information from a debate round into the digital form we've created. From there, the data is sent to a data-structure that allows the information to be called back later for revisions and rankings. Separate functions allow judging access along with student access. As judges submit their scores and comments, students will be filled in with the latest rankings.

debAPP is a faster, easier, and overdue method for scoring debates. We believe as high school debate grows, the technology should grow with it.